Also by Francisco X.

Stork

Marcelo in the Real World

The Last Summer of the
Death Warriors

Irises

The Memory of Light

Disappeared
FRANCISCO X . STORK

SCHOLASTIC PRESS / NEW YORK

 Copyright © 2020 by Francisco X. Stork

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Library of Congress Cataloging‑in‑Publication Data available

ISBN 978‑1‑­338-​­31055‑9

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1  20 21 22 23 24

Printed in the U.S.A.  23

First edition, August 2020

Book design by Christopher Stengel

F O R R O S A LY N M A E S T O R K
 chapte r 1

Sar a

The Fort Stockton Detention Center was an elementary school

not too long ago. Some of the sayings meant to encourage the
children are still on the walls. I was in a line with twenty
women all dressed in blue jumpsuits when I read one of them:
It’s nice to be important but it is more important to be nice.
Yes, but I wouldn’t mind feeling a little more important to
the United States. Even just a tiny acknowledgment from the
government that I existed and that I was not lost in a sea of
asylum petitions.
I counted the number of women ahead of me. Nineteen.
There were so many of us in this ­school-​­turned-​­detention-​­center
that there was always a line for everything. The worst line was
for the showers, which we all needed to take at the end of a hot
day. There were fourteen showers for two hundred and twenty
women. A week ago, the private company that operates the
detention center solved the t­oilet-​­line problem by installing ten
portable toilets behind the gym, but now our outside time stinks.
Another sign. This one on top of a row of yellow lockers.
The picture of an angry bull inside a circle covered with a red
X. Underneath it, the words:
This is a no‑bullying zone.

1
 Tell that to La Treinta Y Cuatro, the guard who made
everyone’s life harder than it needed to be. Yesterday she asked
me if people from Mexico used toilet paper. I felt like remind-
ing her about where her ancestors came from. She sees herself
as different from the rest of us. And not only different but bet-
ter. And as my luck would have it, La Treinta Y Cuatro was up
ahead, doling out job assignments. I was hoping to get one of
the jobs that was advertised by the pro bono legal firm repre-
senting many of the detainees. They had put up a notice for
someone who spoke English and Spanish who could help them
with the interviews. But with La Treinta Y Cuatro deciding?
My chances were slim to none. She didn’t like me. She didn’t
like anybody, that was true. But she seemed to have a special
something for me. Did she know what I did before I got here?
Three weeks ago, I was a reporter in Ciudad Juárez,
Mexico, writing about the hundreds, thousands, of girls who
disappeared from the city’s streets. Most were discovered dead
weeks or months later, but some were never found. My editor
received an e‑mail threatening me and my family if I wrote
about Linda Fuentes. Linda, my best friend, had disappeared
months before. I investigated the source of the e‑mail and even-
tually discovered where Linda and other young women were
being held captive. The State Police, with the help of the FBI
office in El Paso, located Linda and freed her and the other
women.
Before Linda was freed, she sent me the cell phone belong-
ing to Leopoldo Hinojosa, the man responsible for her
enslavement. Hinojosa set out to retrieve his phone and to kill
me and my family. We left our house a few minutes before it

2
 was destroyed by ­machine-​­gun bullets. My mother went to live
with her sister in the interior of Mexico, and my brother,
Emiliano, and I had no choice but to cross illegally into the
United States, where I planned to seek asylum while Emiliano
went with our father to Chicago.
I kept the cell phone in the hope of finding someone in the
U.S. who could open it and use the information to help other
women still in captivity. I can only imagine all the connections
that phone will reveal between Hinojosa and other corrupt
government officials or cartel members. Two of Hinojosa’s
men attacked us in the desert after we crossed into the United
States. One of the men ran away and the other was wounded in
a struggle with Emiliano. We couldn’t let the man bleed to
death, so I went to look for help.
On my way to get help, I ran into Sandy Morgan, a park
ranger. She brought me to her father, attorney Wes Morgan, and
together we decided that I would plead for asylum at the Fort
Stockton Detention Center. Emiliano stayed with the wounded
man until help arrived and then set out alone with Hinojosa’s
cell phone.
The school was transformed into a prison by the simple act
of enclosing the buildings and part of the grounds with a
­twenty-​­foot ­chain-​­link fence with rolls of ­razor-​­sharp wire on
top. They brought in a trailer with eight ­commercial-​­size wash-
ers and dryers and they built three ­cement-​­block isolation cells
with small windows on the top where detainees who misbe-
haved could be kept. Oh, and they also installed cameras every
­twenty-​­four feet. Lucila, my new friend from El Salvador, liked
to tell me that as prisons go, this one wasn’t so bad. And it was

3
at least safer than what awaited Lucila in San Salvador . . . or
me in Juárez. And besides, this was a temporary stay, no? No
one knew how temporary, but sooner or later we would be free.
That was our hope.
So far, Lucila had been detained three months and I only
ten days. Lucila hoped to be reunited with her ­four-​­year-​­old
daughter, who was with a foster family in Indiana. She still
believed that this country would look upon her suffering with
compassion. And I too had faith in the United States and its
laws. I remembered what I told my brother, Emiliano, as we
were deciding to cross: For all its flaws, the United States jus-
tice system was as good as it gets on this here earth. But after
ten days here, my faith was beginning to crack.
Now there were only four women ahead of me. Across
from where I was standing was the room with the dozen or so
telephones available to the detainees. They were operated via a
card that you could buy at another classroom that had been
converted into a small general store. The dollar a day you could
earn at one of the jobs could be used to buy telephone time, or
if you got desperate enough, you could spend your day’s wage
on a cold soda. I had an account where my father had deposited
one hundred dollars when he visited me, so I did not need to
work. Not for money anyway. I planned to give my dollar a day
to Lucila so she could call her daughter. I needed to work for
another reason: to keep my mind occupied and to keep away
the nagging thought that no one in this country cared whether
I lived or died.
I did not know how long a day could last until I came here.
There was a round, white clock on the wall of the gym: The

4
longer you stared at its black hands, the slower they moved.
One of the classrooms was a TV room where, depending on
the guard on duty, we could watch telenovelas from a Mexican
channel. Then there was the “arts and crafts” room, where you
could color children’s books with broken crayons. The day
before yesterday, a group of ladies from the Fort Stockton
Baptist Church brought yarn for knitting and pieces of cloth
and thread for embroidery. When word got around, the line to
get into the arts and crafts room was so long that the guards
had to set up sign‑up sheets and limit the time per person to
one half hour.
As I stood by the door of the classroom that had been
turned into the visitors’ room, I could see the light blue vans
that took women to El Paso for their asylum hearings before
the judge. Those same vans also took women to the airport,
where they boarded planes that would take them to San
Salvador or Tegucigalpa or Guatemala City if their pleas were
denied. If you were Mexican, then a ­green-​­and-​­white Border
Patrol bus dropped you off at the nearest bridge to Mexico. If
you happened to be granted asylum, you were on your own to
find your way to freedom. Being asked to climb on one of those
buses would be the equivalent of being taken to my death. But
those light blue vans always made me think about Emiliano for
some reason. Maybe they reminded me of Saturday mornings
when Brother Patricio would come by our house with a van full
of Jiparis on the way to a desert hike. Wes Morgan told me that
Emiliano was rescued from near death in the desert by a
rancher and that he was there now, waiting for Papá to pick
him up. La prisión, as we liked to call the Fort Stockton

5
Detention Center, was still a safe place. Hinojosa could not get
to me here. But I worried about Emiliano, out there with the
cell phone. I was the one who decided to bring the cell phone
with us, and now he was the one bearing all the risk.
“Number!”
La Treinta Y Cuatro sat behind a table, pen poised over a
sheet of paper, glaring at me.
“What?”
“Your number?”
My number was written on a piece of tape attached to my
chest. At Fort Stockton, we were called by the number assigned
to our bed. “A‑125,” I said meekly. I knew from experience and
from prison wisdom that submission was the best way to
respond to La Treinta Y Cuatro. The A in my name meant that
my bed was in the converted gym. The 125 meant that my bed
was in the middle row of bunks where the air from the four
corner fans never reached.
“Garbage.”
“What?”
“You deaf? You sorda?”
“No. But I was interested in the interpreter’s job. I saw the
note outside the legal services room.”
“Do you want to work or not? Because if you do, garbage is
what we got.”
I knew about the garbage job because I had seen women go
around all areas of the FDC with giant, gray plastic garbage
cans on wheels. I decided to try one more time. “There are very
few women here who speak English. I could be more
useful . . .”

6
 “I could be more useful . . .” La Treinta Y Cuatro mim-
icked me. “Who do you think you are?”
“I don’t think . . .”
“Work is a privilege. You want it or not?”
“I want it,” I said, resigned.
“Go see Elva in the cafeteria. She’ll tell you what to do.”
That afternoon, Elva made the garbage rounds with me,
and I became acquainted with the incredible amount of waste
generated by people who do nothing all day except hope and
wait and pray. My job encompassed emptying all waste recep-
tacles in the facility, including kitchen, bathrooms, dormitories,
and offices. I took the contents to a dumpster in the back. The
strange thing is that as Elva showed me around, I couldn’t wait
to get started. I understood a little of what my brother must
have felt back in Ciudad Juárez when he took off with his bike
and trailer to collect cans on weekends. Yes, Treinta Y Cuatro,
you were right, work is a privilege.
And work, I hoped, would keep my faith from breaking.

7
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